The No.1 reason for any website in South Wales should be that it generates business. Looking good will help, but it should never be the main thing. At Slingshot, we make sure your website delivers results, by continually asking what does your site need to achieve?
Do you need to be found on google? Does it need to answer the questions your current customers are asking? Do you need to attract people to a shop building? Or is the website your shop? Do you need to educate people about your services? Do you need to build a mailing list?
By going beyond design and asking the real questions help us to work on how your website can meet your business needs and give you a tangible return on investment (ROI). It could even be a game changer for your company. We have the skills and knowledge to make that happen, whether you’re just starting out or your old website just isn’t working as well as it should.
Our web service process
Our web service process
CONSULTATION
We believe in accessibility and accountability; that's why we work exclusively for local business in Aberdare and its neighbours.
PLANNING
We work with you to establish the right site for you and your ongoing and potential customers.
DESIGN
Because we build bespoke websites, we can guarantee that your site will reflect and enhance your brand.
USER EXPERIENCE
We understand and monitor the user experience to ensure they find the information they want.
SECURITY
Cybersecurity is big business, and we want you to feel your site is safe so that you have peace of mind.
CONTROL
If you want control of your website, we not only give you access but training too. It's your site after all.
Ready to get started?
Ready to get started?
We want to help local businesses as much as we can and include them in the journey of building their website as much as they want.
Thats why we travel to you. So if you are a local business or charity based in Rhondda, Pontypridd or Brecon and looking to make an impact online, get in touch now.
Understanding Your Business
Understanding Your Business
When you establish a firm’s online presence and begin to expand your online empire, you will want to reach as many people as you possibly can. Here at Slingshot Digital Marketing, we use our bespoke list of services to amplify and magnify that identity – within and without your industry or sector.
We are a South Wales valleys based business and understand the unique challenges to our communities. So whatever the service you provide and however big you are we know we can help to increase your visibility.
YOUR GOALS
Increase sales, establish trust, improve communication or build your brand? What is the most important goal for the online representation of your business? We’ll help you consider your ideal site visitor and plot their journey, so they end up in the right place. Starting from the first few seconds, they arrive at making sure they can reach out to you as quickly as possible.
An attractive website will not achieve your overall aspirations. We can help you set and achieve your marketing ambitions. If you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it every time but if you have a target to hit we can help. We also know its important not to aim at everything because overreaching will leave potential customers unhappy and disinterested.
So know your audience and pitch it to them. You might have some great images, but if your product is highly technical then data, rather the pictures should be your site’s hallmark. Then, present it in such a way that is users can skim read (bullet points and specifications), as large paragraphs are not the best way to communicate that information.
So, measure online success, don’t just hope it’ll work out. We’ll help you benchmark where you start, collect daily data outputs from several outlets to make sure you know the changes and provide figures, so you know your website is making a difference.
USER PERSONA
Something we find incredibly helpful when building websites are creating and finding out your ideal or most common customer. What is important to them what aspects of the site do they want to they use, and this is made up of a whole lot of characteristics. This is built up with things like affluence, education levels, device preference, hobbies and purchasing habits. It’s essential to build this profile so you can understand what payment methods they prefer, how they show trust, days or times that are more accessible to them. This goes to inform many many aspects of the website from the from the marketing language being used to the keywords that need to be targeted.
An excellent example of this is a plumber who would have two different type of personas that they would build their website around. Firstly those that are desperately in need of an emergency repair. The landing pages for Ben need to have emergency 24/7 in big bold red banners with an obvious telephone number. The second persona is of somebody looking to replace the there existing heating system and because of the money involved want to make sure that you are trusted, that you are an expert in your field and that you are reasonably priced. So these pages need to revolve around testimonials so that a user can build up trust and have an understanding of how reasonable your rates are
ROI - RETURN ON INVESTMANT
Potential sales over 3-5 years x Value of each customer – Website Design = Estimated ROI
When you know how many people are looking for your kind of business a month, and how many you think you can attract. Then multiply that monthly value by 3-5 years. So to work backwards, our most popular site costs £750, and we won’t build it if unless you have a chance to attract ten people a month, which over 48 months is potentially 480 people. Thats why we are so sure of our success.
It’s important to say that a good website with good SEO (Search engine optimisation) is often considered the best investment of any marketing strategy. However, the initial upfront cost puts a lot of small businesses off. So let us look a bit deeper.
A website can cost anything from a free DIY ‘drag and drop’ site to a multi-million-pound mega-site, so it’s important to get the right ‘bang per buck’ as it were. Spend too much, and it will be hard to ‘pay off’ and spend too little, and it will never ‘take off’. So you have to invest wisely to make sure that your phone doesn’t stop ringing and it’s more than just the bank that wants to talk.
You have to do your sums for the first, and we can help with the second two (though there are a few SEO tools out that may offer trial periods if you want to find answers yourself).
THE NEW NORM
Mobile First
A mоbіlе wеbsіtе shоuld bе соnsіdеrеd уоur fіrst stер іn dеvеlоріng а mоbіlе рrеsеnсе. This is vital, as the vast majority of web browsing is now carried out on smartphones. From the start of 2018 Google puts a greater emphasis on mobile versions of your website over the desktop experience.
Research
Research
Keyword Research
Maybe you are a shoe shop, and you sell shoes and trainers. Keyword research will show you that in your area there are a hundred people who are searching for trainers, and then a separate group of people searching for shoes online. What’s better for your website? It may be to target the word ‘trainers’ because you’re more likely to get people onto your site if you optimise for that keyword.
It may be that keyword research shows you that people in your area are searching for ‘Adidas trainers’. If you know this, then you can make changes to your website that make it easier for those customers to find you. It’s like this for all elements of your website. The best way to do that is to look at keyword research. It not only helps you to work out what keywords are important, but also the way people search for those words for a service. For example, if you’re a plumber, maybe you’re a plumber that offers an ‘around the clock’ plumbing service. Google is getting better at this but what you’ll probably find is that people are not searching for ‘around the clock plumbing services’, They’re searching for ’emergency plumber’ or ’24/7 plumber’. So ‘we offer an around the clock service’, will not get you the same kind of results as ’emergency plumber 24/7 support’, so sometimes it’s not just the right keywords but the right phrases that help.
This is where the research comes in, and this is why it’s important to do your homework and to understand, not just how you refer to your business, but how people search for the things that are linked to your business. Try and trust the results rather than relying upon your usual business terminology.
Online Competion
To be the best learn from those who are winning and improve on where they are weak.
Firstly we identify your competitors. These may not be sites that sell the same thing as you, but they rank for the words you want to list for.
Next, we gather all kinds of data by crawling their sites and their Google footprint.
From here we start to look at what they are doing on their sites to see the full range of keywords they are ranked for to understand their content. Then we look at their backlinks to know how they’ve built trust with Google.
After we’ve worked through this long process, we can start to see patterns after we’ve worked through 4/5 of your competitors and we can formulate a strategy for your site.
Data Collection
We gather a few different types of data:
1. We track your traffic the moment we start using ‘Google Analytics’, which helps us to, not only see how many people are using your site but also which devices, what time of day, which pages they landed on and what pages they accessed while they were browsing. This helps us see how your site is performing and you can gather an idea of who your online customers are and what’s important to them.
2. ‘Google Console’ tracks how people find your website and it analyses lots of different data sets that your site should hopefully contain. These are technical documents that help Google to assess the structure and information on your site so that Google knows how to rank you effectively. Google doesn’t hide the knowledge that it wants to gather, but it is in a language that isn’t accessible to all.
3. We offer our customers a free tool that allows them to see how their rankings are doing. We track keywords and will enable you to see from day-to-day how useful those keywords are. Also, how valuable the keywords in your opposition’s websites are. It also allows us to create targets going forward so that if you can see you are ranking in one particular area for one service but you are not wholly within the top 4 for a different function in the area, then we can bring balance to optimise the impact of your brand. Alternatively, in another field entirely, you may want to build your web presence, and it allows us to analyse and rely on your current status and assess what was helping you to reach different targets.
We are GDPR compliant and will help you navigate the dos and don’ts with your website.
Every Design is Bespoke
Every design is bespoke
Why do you need a bespoke website?
Because every business is different, therefore every website should reflect that.
Maybe you want a similar service to others that have gone before you, but your customers will be different and may want different things. A website should reflect the needs of your customer, and that is an individual experience. Therefore, although template websites will tick boxes, it will not fulfil the unique journey that your customers want to travel and that you will want to take them on.
Therefore, a tailored experience needs to be created, and different questions need to be answered. This is dependent upon your area, your competition, the makeup of your customers and your ideal customers. It will depend on the browsing that they do, with which type of devices that they do it and what you deem as successful results.
For some services, you may want an enquiry and other times you may want to sell. You need to be able to tailor a journey for your unique customers. Your website needs to address those needs if you want your site to be successful.
A template website – by this I mean a site that is very generic where you add your photos and text will tick boxes but it will only do that because it won’t ask the specific questions that you need and have the right solutions in the right places.
Therefore, it’s less likely to be and give you a return on your investment. If someone wants to sell you a website and all they want is some text and some photos, then you have to question how successful that website will be. If you want a successful site, the designers need to understand your business and the requirements of your users before they will even look at the content.
We also understand the attraction of free website builders and if all you want is to tick a box and don’t want it to achieve anything then it’s probably the best option. However a free website is highly unlikely to be ranked well by google or give customers confidence in your business.
When you hire Slingshot to take care of your web design, SEO, ranking or graphic design services you will receive a finished end product that is wholly original and one hundred percent unique. We do not duplicate our designs, and we hold ourselves to the same high standards that we continuously inspire our customers. We don’t paint by numbers.
FUNCTIONALITY
Functionality is about what your website does. You’ve now decided what the customer journey is, but how do we make that happen?
This is about the nuts and the bolts, the building blocks, to assemble this architect’s plan. It’s about the right tools to complete the job. If it’s an e-commerce shop, you need a database of products, you need baskets, you need a checkout page, and you need somewhere that you can process credit card details. Also because of this, you need breadcrumbs – you need a trail that people can follow so that, for example, they can go forward into red boots and come back and then try black boots or something. Alternatively, if your goal is to get leads -unique contact details- then you’ve got to find the best way to get those details, and you need to decide how you want those details saved or stored. If you’re a shop, you might want a 360-degree view of the place to entice people in and to give them an understanding of what’s behind the door. If you do art and craft, then maybe you want a gallery so that people have got a full range. Perhaps you need a portfolio to show off what you have to offer entirely. These are all different functions, all different parts to add to the complexity and the gravitas of your website.
The functionality isn’t just about the end user. It’s also about you and us, your digital marketers. You might need a way to go in and edit text or add images, but you’re not proficient in coding, or we might need to store data and analytics to understand how things are working.
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In this case, it’s not just about choosing what tools you need. There are different options for each of those tools as there is not one type of e-commerce engine but several. There’s not one way to gather analytics but 30. There’s not one content management service. So, we can help you navigate through your options and pick the right tool for the job. Our expertise will help to build your success, as we use our extensive experience to help you choose the functionality that uniquely supports your business.